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In the "Golden Twenties", the Kurfürstendamm was the glittering centre
of the "new" West. Bars, cabarets, cafés, cinemas, pubs, restaurants
and nightclubs all lined the avenue and lent it a cosmopolitan air. Although
the former "pleasure mile" was largely in ruins after the Second World
War, the amusement industry was soon revived in the lower storeys of burnt
out buildings. People settled for provisional venues, since the need for
diversion and entertainment was great. In the fifties, many of the
damaged buildings were demolished and replaced by new buildings in austere
post-war style. The Kurfürstendamm developed into the showpiece of
the western half of the city. Its display window was a café that
now no longer exists in its original form: the "Café Kranzler"
on the prominent corner of Ku’damm and Joachimstaler Straße. The
filigree building designed by Hanns Dustmann and completed in 1958 was
a popular meeting place for Berliners, and tourists regarded it as a symbol
of the busy avenue. Stopping for coffee at a high-class establishment was,
however, only one facet of a wide range of opportunities for amusement.
The city centre was interwoven by a tight network of pubs, jazz clubs,
beer taverns and wine bars. The real trump card was not the diversity
of facilities, but rather the unrestricted opening hours that made West
Berlin a paradise for night owls. The city was also liberal as far as awarding
licences was concerned. This led to a high fluctuation in the trade which,
along with restructuring of the centre of West Berlin, has had the effect
that there are hardly any original pubs and restaur-ants from the fifties
to seventies left now. But some legends still exist, albeit in a modified
form: the "Big Eden", for example, the "Bremer Gallery" and the "Paris
Bar". Away from the city centre, architectural monuments such as
the curious "Bierpinsel" tower restaurant are prime examples that lend
each of the various districts its own individual identity. Following
reunification, nothing remains of the pubs and restaurants run by the GDR
state trade organisation, HO, largely responsible for gastronomy in the
East. Some names from the GDR era still exist, since they were inextricably
linked with listed buildings in the newly developed city centre at that
time, but the concepts are different now: examples are the famous "Café
Moskau" and the "Café Sibylle" on Karl-Marx-Allee. The legendary
"Ahornblatt" restaurant on the Fischerinsel, completed in 1973 according
to a design by Gerhard Lehmann and Rüdiger Plaethe, has vanished from
the cityscape. Like the disappearance of the "Kranzler" in the West, its
demolition stands for the constant transformation of Berlin: the
city continues to move forward and with it the gastronomy that will always
be subject to current tastes.
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